Putting my process hat on, might I suggest something like the following as a possible procedure for development and approval of Working Group output? Obviously what procedure the community agrees to is entirely up to you all, but in the interests of gaining agreement on a basic procedure here you go: 1) Working Group members develop an output statement/intervention/ submission. Since each region is to have at least one member on each Working Group, it would be most helpful if those members could introduce the working group to the points of view that the region in question has on the subject. There will also be one (or more) ALAC members on each WG, so these should be reflecting their colleagues' views on the subject to the WG. 2) Once the WG has finished a draft, this is sent by regional secretariats to the regions for approval. The mechanism used is a No Objections Procedure (which means if no objections are registered, the document is presumed to be acceptable. Any objections should contain the following elements and be sent to the regional list: a) The exact portion of the text which is objectionable. b) What the issue is and whether it is a strongly-held objection, a comment, or an objection which should not hold up approval (mild objection) c) What the proposed modification to the specific portion of the text is. A properly formed objection would need to be composed of all three elements. In general, each region would have 10 days to make any such objections known. 3) Upon completion of the regional reviews, the working group would synthesise any objections received to try to create a consolidated, completed draft. It should be clear what amendments have been received in the text. As a part of creating this synthesis, the Secretariats of all the regions would collaborate to ensure that the resulting text would not itself be objectionable to their respective region. 4) The synthesis text would be given to the ALAC for a 10 day period for review. This would also be on a No-Objections Procedure. It would be hoped that ALAC members would not raise objections to portions of the text which were not objected to by any RALO or ALS. 5) The text would then be communicated to the relevant body or person labelled clearly as the position of the At-Large Community as a whole. Notes: Obviously, the members of the Working Group should be working with their regions, and ALAC members on Working Groups should be working with their ALAC colleagues at the same time, so that the views of all interested parties should to the extent possible be reflected in the text finalised in step 1. Clearly, the more effective this pre- finalisation consultation is, the less likely that WG output will be hung up in the regions or in ALAC. On 19 Aug 2007, at 21:28, Alan Greenberg wrote:
If the submission is to be labeled as coming from the ALAC, it really needs to be seen by the committee, at the very least for comments/objections if not for a vote.
Assuming that all those who are interested are subscribed is not valid, at least in my case. Perhaps you could send out the current draft. The purpose should be primarily for information, although I presume that if someone finds some glaring error or omission it could be pointed out. But review from outside the working group should not be taken as an opportunity for the wider community to start the discussions all over again. From that point, you are correct that if they wanted to participate they should have from the start.
Alan
At 19/08/2007 02:58 PM, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
All,
as I am working on the output of the "RAA revision" working group, I am wondering what is the procedure to finalize the document. I think that, once consensus is reached in the WG, the document could be immediately released, as participation is open and I would expect any ALAC or ALS members that are interested in contributing to be already subscribed to the WG. In any case, the deadline for submission is September 10, so I would like to know in advance whether the document needs to go through further procedures or approval once agreed upon by the WG, not to miss the deadline.
Thanks, -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------
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